A Watch That Records Your Surf Session

Extend that glorious moment of a perfectly caught wave beyond the ocean.

Dubbing itself ‘The World’s First Search GPS Watch,’ Rip Curl’s wrist-worn device brings a level of data-driven self-assessment to a traditionally low-tech sport. The watch can track your surf by registering your top speed and distance. It’ll also count how many waves you ride in each session. You can then sync your data to an app, and it’ll record your location with a map and format your data into little graphic charts.

Image Credit: Rip Curl

Here’s a cool thing: you can relive your entire surfing session through graphic overlays of collected GPS data on satellite imagery. Then you can share those visualizations with friends.

Why record and track all this information? Because we can. Because we like to navel-gaze. Because we like to analyze our own behavior and stack ourselves up against our friends. Because we acknowledge that robots and quantitative data are going to be our next benevolent(?) overlords. While we’re skeptical of this kind of technology, it’s very interesting.